


What's Up With That

by kittykatthetacodemon



Series: Luck of the Draw [4]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Comment Fic, Explanations, Not Actually A Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-06 23:30:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8773750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittykatthetacodemon/pseuds/kittykatthetacodemon
Summary: THIS IS NOT A FIC.  This is a series of explanations for the powers of everybody involved in my series, Luck of the Draw.  I'll be doing about one person per chapter, except for a kind of mass chapter at the end for all the minor characters / OCs.





	1. Faraday's Luck

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE ASK ME ANY QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT HAVE. I did my best to explain this stuff, but obviously it makes perfect sense in my head or I wouldn't have made this thing at all, so if I skipped a step or three, or if something doesn't seem logically sensible, I can try to clarify.

Faraday is basically Vegas personified, like if Penn & Teller operated exclusively at a casino poker table and also were actually magic.  His gift is a bit of luck, a bit of superstition, and a bit of wishing—and all that adds up to something like magic if you squint just right.  Luck is the main thing.  Odds tend to bend themselves to meet his needs, whether or not he means it.  When he doesn’t, you get little weirdly unlikely things: church bells chiming just in time to end an awkward conversation, stumbling into the perfect hidey-hole just as the bad guys are about to catch him, etc.  He’s generally a great gambler because of it, because while he expects (and therefore gets) some runs of bad luck, when he really needs it he tends to win.

Faraday's gift works best when people don't realize it's even happening.  Part of this is Faraday operating on middle school levels and not wanting to "jinx it," but a not insignificant part really is his gift trying to work itself to his advantage.  Think about it this way: nobody wants a card sharp in a casino.  Nobody wants to play with a guy who's going to win, no matter what.  That doesn't mean that Faraday doesn't want to play with them.  So secrecy, misdirection, and sleight-of-hand have all become so ingrained with his gift that in Faraday's mind, they are a part of the process for using his powers.  My descriptions in the story of Faraday intentionally using his powers tend to start out with something more grounded in reality simply because A) Faraday needs and understands that method of accessing his gift, and B) he actually thinks they're necessary, even though they're not.  A lot of times, this manifests as him needing something tactile (usually his cards) or some kind of trick to get his best results.

This is also why most of the coolest stuff he does ends up being an accident.  He's not wrong when he says his gift operates however he believes it should; his conception of what he can do and how absolutely effects the way it works in reality.

When he _does_ sort of mean to use his gift, at what I'm calling the "superstition" level, very unlikely things start to happen just because he thinks they should.  One example of this is that nobody but him gets hurt significantly in the fight against Bogue.  He believes his cards are “lucky” and will protect people, and therefore they do.  This is not impossible to override!  He destroyed his jack of spades the first time in Rose Creek because he was using it for luck and survival and then went on a suicide run where he actively believed he was going to die.

A lot of the really weird shit he can do hovers around this level, when he bothers to use his gift at all, because he doesn’t believe he’s powerful enough for anything else (and so usually he isn’t).  His cards have become a sort of focus point for him, because so much of what he recognizes as his gift happens when he’s using them.  (I cannot imagine why a gambler would use a luck-based superpower, can you?  Also _my_ superpower is sarcasm.)  It really was never about the cards, though.  He could absolutely do the same thing with anything else or with nothing at all, if he wasn’t so convinced otherwise.  He covers mild uses of his gift a lot of times with sleight-of-hand and fast talking, to the point where even he isn’t sure if he’s using his powers.  But if there’s a gamble involved, he absolutely is, even when he doesn’t realize it.

He can use this same principle at an even higher level, which is basically probability manipulation so powerful it essentially becomes wish fulfillment.  If it isn’t actively impossible (or if he doesn’t believe it’s totally impossible), then he can make it happen.  However, he almost never does this.  Only really big and really small stuff happen at this level, mostly because he’s decided he’s definitely never thinking about it as a sort of self-defense mechanism.  (He’s always been a gambler at heart.  How would anything be worth doing if he could win every time without any effort?) 

Instead, Faraday uses this as a real-life version of the old “rabbit out of a hat” magic trick.  Need some dynamite?  Boom.  Need your cards?  Obviously they’re right in your pocket where you expected to find them.  Need your guns?  Well, reach out and take them.  He doesn’t define this part well at all in his own thoughts, mostly because he can’t consider using his gift all the time at this level and still operate as a human being.  That isn’t to say that he isn’t capable of doing a ton of cool and interesting stuff with this aspect of his gift, just that he has not and probably will not ever do those things.  He’s not limited by imagination, exactly, just by disbelief.  Well, he’s limited a bit by imagination.  Probability manipulation is probably one of the most versatile and terrifying powers anyone could ever have, and Faraday uses it to…avoid minor inconveniences, mostly.  Potential supervillains everywhere resent him for not putting this to better use.

So, long story short: Faraday is good at card tricks and pulling quarters out of his ear.  He would always win the coin toss at the Super Bowl.  If you asked him, he’d say his power is mostly useless, except when it sometimes isn’t, and not at all powerful, except when it is.  Faraday is also an idiot who doesn’t realize he could basically rule the earth with his gift if he had a bit of time and forethought.

It’s like giving the Infinity Stone in _Guardians of the Galaxy_ to Peter Quill: he’s not going to take over the universe with it.  He’s going to have a dance-off, obviously.  Or it’s like giving Owen Grady from _Jurassic World_ a bunch of velociraptors, because we all know he’s going to teach them how to be part of his motorcycle squad instead of training them for military combat like he’s supposed to.  Joshua Faraday is not going to use his magical universe-bending powers at anything like their full strength, or to do anything worth noticing.  He’s going to scam assholes in backwater bars out of their whiskey and their wallets; he’s going to stick to sleight-of-hand and the kind of magic you see performers doing out on the streets.  And all this is when he really can do what observers would define as _literal actual magic_.

Jesus Christ, Faraday.


	2. Vasquez Still Can't Read Minds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not that this one was too hard to figure out through context, but here's some detail that might not have been clear.

Vasquez is what I’m calling a projecting empath.  The main part of this is that he can sense the emotions of others and project his emotions toward others.  With enough effort, he could probably override what they feel with his own feelings, but that would require insane amounts of focus and effort.  Why do that when he could just shoot whoever’s trying to fuck with him directly in the face?  The projection part of his gift works much better with people he knows well and people who have thoughts and inclinations that align with his own, which is why it’s possible to not notice he’s projecting anything at all if he happens to be thinking along the same lines as you.  Since the Seven get along decently well, and they’ve spent a good amount of time together, Vasquez can probably connect with the other six well enough to make himself understood...to a certain extent.

Faraday wouldn’t know this, but most people (even the other five) do not get as clear a sense as he does of what Vasquez is thinking just from the set of his emotions.  Over the course of _Look At My Hands_ and _Trust Falls_ , Faraday can describe with decent accuracy what Vasquez is feeling at any given time, and estimate how he might react based on that.  In _Queen of Spades_ , Emma mentions that Vasquez is (unintentionally) broadcasting something unpleasant behind her while she’s bringing Faraday back from the dead.  If Faraday hadn’t been—you know—dead at the time, he probably would have recognized things like grief, anger, the kinds of anxiety and hope that hurt.  Most of the other townsfolk probably would just say “Really prickly?  Like if a cactus crawled inside my chest and rolled around a little.  I don’t like it.”  (In a way, it’s kind of like translating normal human emotional comprehension back down to Faraday-level comprehension.  Ohhhh snap.)

Vasquez also has the ability to take or give pain with a touch.  Generally speaking, this requires skin-on-skin contact, or at least extreme proximity.  While he does use negative emotions sometimes as an offensive weapon, he almost never uses pain that way.  He would actively need to feel that pain himself while passing it along.  Furthermore, taking pain away from others requires him to first share that pain as well.  If in _Look at My Hands_ , it seems like he’s reacting along with Faraday to what’s happening, that’s because he is.  He’s not crazy enough to just take all of it and go screaming off into the night, so instead he just takes enough that he feels whoever-it-is (Faraday in this case) stop projecting _fuck fuck fuck everything is awful_ and settle down to something a little more tolerable.  But in any case, any time he is taking someone else’s pain, he does so by feeling whatever portion of it that he’s taken away.

One mistake Faraday makes, and probably a lot of others too, is the assumption that understanding emotions translates directly to understanding the underlying thoughts that led to those emotions.  In chapter four of _Trust Falls_ , Faraday and Vasquez have a series of arguments that end…badly.  What Faraday is actually thinking (if he were emotionally adept enough to vocalize it) is something along these lines: "I am confused by and uncomfortable with this conversation because I don’t like talking about feelings and do not really understand what I feel or what I want at this point.  I am upset and a little angry at the guy who just mocked me and suggested things that I am not ready to address just yet, and I kind of get why everyone’s disgusted with me because I’m kind of disgusted with myself right now.  Please stop making me have this conversation, I don’t like it, and I don’t like how it makes us act all weird."  What Vasquez is getting is more like this: very uncomfortable, confused, upset, maybe even angry, some mild disgust.  This is all undercut with a strong feeling of _do not want_.  So Faraday might actually want to express something like “can’t we talk about this later?  Feelings are hard.”  But what Vasquez is getting is “let’s talk about this never, and also we’re just friends, why are you making this weird?”

If Vasquez actually went digging around, he’d find all the stuff that Faraday feels but doesn’t acknowledge or understand.  But he’s not going to do that, because he is the picture of courtesy with his mind-gift.  He “knocks” before he intrudes on anyone else’s mind.  He doesn’t use what people feel against them, or even casually at all.  He only regularly uses it in fights, where every weapon matters, and when he feels very comfortable with someone.  Otherwise, he can literally feel how uncomfortable he’s making people, so he avoids it.

In fact, a huge portion of the time when Vasquez projects anything, Faraday is the only one who’s receiving it at all.  (If this surprises you, just go look back at how often Vasquez is broadcasting the emotional equivalent of “I <3 U” at Faraday, even before they were a thing.  Then consider how often he does this while other people are in the room, and how awkward that would be for everyone involved if this was something everyone could feel.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.)  This is a matter of choice and preference rather than actual ability.  Way back in _Look at My Hands_ , Faraday almost immediately went from “hey, this is suspicious and a little invasive” to “lol, this is weird but I’m cool with it.”  This is not the normal human reaction to this power; even the people who are cool with it probably take a "less is more" approach to the whole thing.  Vasquez, who had probably been a little connection-deprived while hiding out in the middle of nowhere, takes Faraday's acceptance as tentative permission to just sort of project away until and unless he gets told to stop.  He probably shouldn’t; he has such a concrete idea of when and how it’s appropriate to be used, and this is definitely not within those guidelines.  Faraday isn’t complaining, though, so he’s just going for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Billy is coming up next!


	3. Billy Rocks Brings Knives to a Gunfight (and Wins)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I got here eventually. I love how my brain is like "you should go work on the thing!" and then I spend 36 hours straight watching British comedians on YouTube. Ahhh, productivity, my old friend, where have you gone?

Billy Rocks is hard to kill.

To be a little more specific: Billy Rocks is _very_ hard to kill.

More seriously, Billy’s gift isn't all that complicated; it's what Goody and I like to call “cockroach tendencies.”  This shows itself in a number of ways.  His reflexes, speed, strength, and fighting skills are slightly enhanced, which allow him to bring knives to a gun fight and not—you know—die an immediate and horrible death, the way he definitely should if we’re using real-world logic here.  In a more general sense, he also isn’t as likely to get sick, wounds don’t get infected, etc.  Billy’s gift is basically very determined to see him die of old age or not at all.

He also operates a little on what I’ve just started calling the “Faraday Principle,” where insanely unlikely things happen to him.  For example, in _Look at My Hands_ , Goody describes someone trying to shoot Billy in the head and having the gun backfire.  On a scale of one to “holy lord, that should not have happened,” that would rate approximately seven million, and yet Billy is still kicking and that particular idiot got to experience what it felt like to have his insides become his outsides.  Unlike Faraday, however, Billy’s enhanced luck is limited just to survival.  He’ll find himself stepping to the side just in time to avoid the bullet aimed at his face; it won’t help him win at poker or even make him any better at killing someone else in turn.  (He’s just naturally talented in that arena, apparently.)

In any case, an attempt to kill him is going to be insanely difficult, though not actively impossible.  Think about it like this: if someone pointed you at a pool of water and told you to empty it with your hands tied behind your back, you could probably manage it.  You’d get there eventually, but only if you tried _really_ hard and believed in yourself, and only so long as the water didn’t decide to turn around and gut you for the attempt.

Billy’s gift manifests differently from, say, Vasquez’s or Red Harvest’s gifts.  This is because unlike a lot of other powers, it’s mostly a passive thing, something happening _to_ Billy rather than something he is actively _doing_.  For the average healthy person, the likelihood of imminent death matches the danger levels of whatever they’re doing at the time: someone cleaning windows outside of the first floor of a building is far less likely to die than someone cleaning windows outside of the sixtieth floor.  For Billy, he would be as safe sixty floors up as he would be on the ground.  There’s a thing people do where they let archers shoot at them and then try to catch the arrows midair before they get hit; Billy is the sort of person where it would be weirder if he _didn’t_ catch those arrows on his first-ever try, without any practice at all, than it would be if he did.  It's probably a pretty damn useful skill for someone who spends the majority of his life getting shot at or trying to avoid getting shot at.

In retrospect, Billy is probably best equipped to understand Faraday’s problem with a gift that does things seemingly outside his control.  Without active control over his powers, there’s always going to be a separation between his conscious will and what’s happening to him, though I have to admit that Billy has a much better grasp on what’s going on in his own head than Faraday ever did.  Still, even Billy isn’t entirely sure what would happen if he ever reached a point where he put a gun to his own head and tried to pull the trigger.

* * *

Not actually related to Billy's gift, exactly, but I'm throwing this out here anyway.  I like to think that in this universe, Goody probably became more attached to Billy much more quickly, if only because there was practically no chance that Goody could hurt him, no matter how fucked up he was.  I wrote a little Goody/Billy blurb that will never get used that I might as well throw here:

“Goody doesn’t care for Billy because of his gift, but he does love the reassurance of it, that bedrock-solid knowledge that no matter how often his demons chase after him, no matter when or how vengeance comes to strike him down, he won't drag Billy down in his wake.  Christ, he couldn’t kill Billy if he tried, and Lord knows he’s woken up from his nightmares swinging often enough, lost himself in gunfire and smoke, past and present, until it’s hard to tell the difference between friend and foe.  But Billy, oh, Billy—he dodges through storms of bullets like they’re nothing but smoke.  He dances with death, catches it between his teeth and spits it back at whoever thought to deal it out in the first place.  There’s nothing Goody could do, nothing he’s done, that would stick if he lost his mind enough to attack.  That’s not unimportant.

Christ only knows why Billy sticks around close enough to let him try.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm thinking I'll do Horne next, then Chisolm, and finally Red Harvest before I round the whole thing off with one longer bit about all the other characters I've messed around with throughout the series. It'll include Bogue, Emma, every named OC, and probably just some general commentary on the unnamed ones. While I'm thinking about it, please throw in any questions about gifts/powers in general that you might have down in the comments and I'll try to cover them as well in that last chapter. Or just ask and I'll tell you straight off in the comments, since time and experience have proven I have essentially zero self-control


	4. Horne's Mind is Still (Sort of) Intact (Somehow)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basically this boils down to "seeing the future isn't all its cracked up to be" and "he could be crazier than he actually is, guys"

Horne’s gift is the Sight, and it isn’t nearly as fun as people might assume.  His ability allows him to see every potential future, which sounds insanely useful until you realize just how many potential futures there are from any given point in time (and then his gift just sounds insane).  It focuses exclusively on him and the people closest to him; he can’t see a hurricane about to hit New York, for example, but he’d probably do pretty well at predicting the local weather.  Instead of distance, his gift has a broad range through time.  The farther out in time that Horne Sees, the more potential outcomes there are, and the more difficult his gift gets; this is because more time allows for more decisions to be made and for outside influences to have greater effects on the potential outcomes.

Think about it this way: three seconds from now, there might be only three or four ways the future might turn out for Horne, all depending on local decisions and actions.  These very close futures are the ones Horne can most easily understand and influence, because everything depends on taking or preventing immediate action.  One minute out, those three or four outcomes might blossom into twenty or thirty; an hour might take him into the thousands, and days or weeks become almost uncountable.  Each additional person involved multiplies the number of potential outcomes exponentially, and every passing second changes the specific details of those potentials.

Now imagine trying to process all those results, millions and billions and trillions of them, piling up and ever-changing.  Is anyone really surprised that Jack Horne might be a _little_ off his rocker?

Horne does have some control over all this, or else he’d be sitting in a corner, drooling and rocking back and forth all day.  I imagine it would work a little like tuning a radio or playing with the channel on a television: every single potential future is on its own wavelength, each slightly different from the next.  These are sorted into broad categories based on similarities between them, which gives Horne a chance to group them and either dismiss a set or focus in on them, depending on what he’s looking for or how he’s trying to influence outcomes.

During that week in Rose Creek, for example, Horne would have seen millions of potential futures, some more likely than others.  He might have sorted them into broad categories, like “everyone lives” or “everyone dies,” or even the more generic “success” and “failure,” and then weighed up which of those sets would be more likely.  Every change or addition to the plan would have shifted this balance; every step along the process would have added some potentials and removed others.  His goal would be to reduce the likelihood of the worst possibilities (Bogue kills everyone, the town is destroyed, fire everywhere) and increase the chances for the best ones (the Seven kill Bogue and all his men, nobody dies, the townspeople live happily ever after and the Seven ride off into the sunset). 

This is essentially an impossible task.  Even the best plans require a number of unknowns to come together in the right way to succeed.  Adding dynamite, for example, meant the Seven could take out more of Bogue’s men outside of town, but the timing needed to be perfect and Bogue’s men all needed to rush in a mass, which wasn’t exactly a sure thing.  It could have been helpful; it could have done nothing at all.  If they’d misjudged it enough, it might even have done them some harm.  It’s all possibilities and likelihood, a billion ways to succeed or fail, and most of it is outside of any one man’s control.

More than anything, Horne is going to make broad statements and avoid outright promises unless something is ridiculously skewed toward success or failure.  Hell, most of the time he’s going to outright ignore everything he Sees about the long run, because chances are in fifteen seconds it’s all going to be completely different.

One of the reasons Horne does so well with the Seven is that they are an intense stabilizing force.  That’s not to say that they are predictable (or even that they’re stable, because they’re all lunatics with itchy trigger fingers), but the universe tends to bend to meet their whims.  If the Magnificent Seven go out on a mission, the odds tend to shift in their favor, which means a man with the Sight can have a lot more faith in what he Sees and what he can expect.  I’m not even talking about Faraday in particular, though obviously his luck and probability manipulation have had noticeable effects on Horne’s Sight.  All seven of them have the luck, skill, and force of will to claw success from the jaws of defeat; that makes a difference in what Horne can See.  If I could see the future, I would also try to make friends that made the whole thing a little less messy and painful to deal with.

I would also probably have lost my mind a long time ago, so kudos to Jack Horne for still displaying some levels of sanity and engagement with reality.


	5. Chisolm Sees You When You're Sleeping, He Knows When You're Awake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this from my phone, so let's see how formatting and all that turn out (eep). Will fix any issues later today once my laptop decides it is no longer 5-10 hour update time

Chisolm has superpowered senses, which allow him to see, hear, smell, and taste to an incredible degree. When he stretches his senses, he can see clearly enough to read an open book a mile away, hear a heartbeat from across town, smell better than most scenthounds, and taste individual ingredients in food. He probably has the best control of his gift of anyone in the Seven (or, really, anyone we've encountered in the 'verse), as well as the clearest idea of exactly what his gift is and how it operates.

This power has its pros and cons. On the positive side, his gift is very useful for someone who deals with dangerous people for a living. He can sense most threats before they even know he's coming; his gifts let him act essentially as a human lie detector (except his findings are probably more accurate than any of the pseudo-science lie detector crap). He can taste poisons in food. He can smell metal and gunpowder from hidden weapons. His night vision is also superhuman, which means he's never at a disadvantage, even in total darkness.

His power isn't all sunshine and roses, however. Sudden changes in light or sound can be disorienting or even painful if he has his senses turned up high. While he can "adjust" the strength of his powers anywhere along the scale from normal human sensing to his full-power abilities, his default state is somewhere in the middle. This means he's aware of any threats that might try sneaking up on him, but also that he picks up on things that he probably wouldn't want to know about. If you know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge. (I'm talking about sex, guys. If you're having sex in the same building as Chisolm, he can hear it. And probably smell it. And while he can quickly turn off his senses as soon as he realizes what's happening, there's no way to erase those memories.)

To be totally honest, I absolutely got this power straight out of The Sentinel, because to me the idea of Chisolm as a super-sensing protector just seems too perfect to be real. The only difference between Chisolm's powers and the Sentinel abilities are A) Chisolm does not have an enhanced sense of touch, and B) Chisolm possesses an innate understanding of his gift and how to control it. Without that natural control, his senses would have quickly overwhelmed him, and so out of all the gifts in this universe, Chisolm's is the only one that has been active since the moment he was born, and the only one that did not require trial-and-error or practice to perfect. While he recognizes his power is unusual, it actually took him a while to realize he was gifted at all.

Chisolm can also piggyback one sense off another. The most useful example would be using his sense of hearing to get an impression of what something he can't see "looks" like. Listening through a wall or a closed door, for example, would give him a decent idea of what's on the other side. This is useful in firefights (bullets can shoot through things you can't see through) and isn't actually totally unbelievable for normal people to attempt. If you all remember, in the canon fight scene where the Seven drive out Bogue's Blackstone men for the first time, Faraday uses the sounds of footsteps on the balcony above his head to help him aim and take out the enemies he can't actually see.

All in all, it's probably lucky for everyone that Chisolm went the lawful route. He has blackmail material on just about everyone he meets just because he can always tell what they're doing behind closed doors. Like Vasquez, though, he has an impeccable sense of privacy and "personal space," so he does his best to not pry into people's affairs more than he needs to, and he never shares what he's found unless it's relevant. (For example: Faraday, you idiot, I can totally tell you're bleeding again, stop telling me you're fine.)

Assholes and criminals are fair game. Chisolm's a lawman, not a _saint_.


	6. Red Harvest is Cooler Than U

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM NOT DEAD. Sorry for the unbelievable delay, you guys, but I had to pack up my entire life and move about 300 miles, and oddly enough that sucks up quite a bit of free time. Who'd'a thunk it?? Anyway, because I am very sorry, I am posting both Red's chapter and the massive "everybody else" chapter at the same time. Please accept my humble offerings and forgive me, I am so ashamed D':

Red Harvest calls himself a _stormbringer_ , and a lot of the time people don’t really think about what that means.  The most obvious aspect of his gift is his lightning, which he manifests most often as a visible current of electricity across his skin, though he’s demonstrated an ability to create and control lightning that uses him as a source point rather than any actual weather phenomenon.  (Or, in case that’s not clear, the lightning originates from him rather than from the sky.  It’s like magic!)  He uses it as a weapon and as crowd control: shocking or electrocuting enemies, chaining it from one person to the next, etc.  It works well as an intimidation method, too, since electric sparks are very bright, very visible, and very obviously dangerous.  Red Harvest is also very visible and obvious while he creates and directs electrical energy, and folks think that it’s the extent of his powers.

Accepting this at face value would be a mistake.  Red Harvest, of course, strongly encourages people to accept this at face value.

In reality, Red controls the weather.  He can control existing weather conditions, but he can also generate them on his own.  Bigger and more complex things take a lot of concentration and effort; this would include massively altering pre-existing local conditions (such as creating a rainstorm in a desert) or forcing out-of-season conditions (like making it snow in the middle of a hot summer).  This is not as simple as declaring “and now, let there be rain!”  Like all weather patterns, Red Harvest’s control relies on atmospheric conditions that he can manipulate to achieve the outcome he wants.  This does mean, for example, that if he wants it to rain, the moisture is going to have to come from somewhere.  In essence, if he draws moisture from the air or from existing clouds, he’s preventing rain that would have occurred naturally later on or somewhere else; if he takes it from closer to the ground, he runs the risk of killing off plant life, drying out fertile soil, etc.

This is bad, in case you couldn’t guess.  Any significant shift in the weather causes a Butterfly Effect of terrible after-effects that he can’t always predict or regulate.  This is why, for the most part, he doesn’t go disturbing the natural order of things as he pleases; his lightning, at least, is self-contained and easy to control, and it doesn’t have long-term effects on the local environment.  Since it also packs a serious punch, this doesn’t hinder him most of the time.  When he does decide to do something more, he goes all out, which is why in _Trust Falls_ he basically just shrugs, thinks _fuck it_ , and turns the battlefield into a swamp.  He’s good enough that he can probably offset most of the worst repercussions, anyway, and not accidentally set up an El Nino cycle in the desert or something equally weird.  (Can you tell I’m a California kid?) 

The nitty-gritty of his gift would probably make any student of weather science lose their minds.  I’m not going to go technical, since I absolutely do not understand the technical aspects of meteorology, but Red Harvest does understand more than literally anyone else in the late 1800s and would probably be declared King of Atmospheric Phenomena.  If that existed.  Which it does not.  But who cares?  Let’s all pitch in to buy a crown for the man that Kat2107 and I have declared “the bestest little badass biscuit in existence.”

Red also has an intense connection to the weather.  This allows him to predict conditions better than any weatherman ever will, but more importantly, it allows him to “feel” weather conditions as well as their causes and effects.  It’s strongest with weather patterns he has generated himself, but it does work just fine with the naturally occurring position of the local climate.  I have to imagine that Red Harvest is the only person in the world who could stand in the open in the middle of a hurricane and actually enjoy himself.


	7. Everyone Else

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to sort things out a little so this whole chapter doesn't turn into a total mess, but chances are it's still confusing and I've probably left someone out. But it's done! I promised I'd finish it and I always will. WIPs are sad and they make me cry on the inside. Ask if there are unanswered questions, don't be shy! I've been out of touch for a while but I'm back in action (finally) and I really do try to answer every comment I get (eventually).

SOME GENERAL INFORMATION:

When coming up with powers for characters, major or minor, I always tried to flesh them out as much as possible in my head so that whatever came across in the story felt like a small glimpse into a fully realized gift rather than a half-hearted throwaway idea.  I came up with a variety of categories to fit them into that made them easier to define, as well.  For example, every gift is either physical (affecting the real world and real objects, like telekinesis, weather manipulation, or plant growth), mental (affecting the mind or reliant on the mind, like empathy, the Sight, mind control, or Faraday’s luck), or static (a constant that has been altered from the norm, like Billy’s survival, Chisolm’s super senses, or Bogue’s Null).  There are also gifts that primarily affect the self (like Billy or Sam), affect others (Emma, Bogue), affect the world (Red Harvest), or affect any combination of the above (Faraday, Vasquez).

I did develop one specific type of gift that didn’t see much use in the fic, and that would be Gifts That Influence Other Gifts.  Bogue falls under this umbrella; Faraday kind of accidentally shoehorned himself into it, though it’s a result of imagination more than a direct result of his powers.  People with these powers are Lifts, Mirrors, or Nulls.  Lifts have a knack for improving a person’s skill or strength with their powers—or lessening them.  Mirrors are copycats, essentially, who can in some way take on all or part of another person’s gift.  And Nulls like Bogue can block or take away another person’s gift.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that the main characters all have the most incredible gifts (or just awesome talent, in Goody’s case, which is arguably just as unlikely and twice as notable for the lack in this universe).  I should probably feel shame over that, but I think it kind of makes sense in context that so many of the Seven are unbelievably gifted in their fields but also very powerfully Gifted as well.  The whole idea of the Magnificent Seven is that a few highly skilled, incredibly talented men have the ability to overcome impossible odds and insurmountable obstacles.  They are just seven ordinary-seeming men—and yet they make all the difference.  When I was establishing powers for everyone, it felt right to give all the main characters (the Seven and Emma especially) the strongest and most impressive powers, because they make their unlikely success just a little more believable.  It made even more sense to make them not use those powers to full capacity, intentionally or unintentionally, because nothing about the whole situation was supposed to be _easy_.

Please feel free to ask if you have any more questions!  Let’s get on to specifics!

From _Look at My Hands_

BOGUE: Null.  His gift needs physical contact to work, but once he’s touched a person with a gift, they are unable to access that gift again until he allows it.  He doesn’t have any gradations, either: it’s an all-or-nothing power.  His death returned all the powers he’d ever stolen, which had to be a surprise for anyone minding their own business months or years after an encounter with the asshole.

EMMA CULLEN: Necromancy.  She can bring anyone or anything dead back to life, and she can talk to the spirits of the dead.  However, this is only useful for a brief time after unnatural deaths.  Emma can see the “soul strings” that connect spirits to bodies, and once those are gone, the person can no longer be returned without consequences (think creepy zombie levels of wrong, folks) and they cannot be spoken to.  They “pass on,” and Emma doesn’t mess around with them after that point.  However, before that point, she has a window of opportunity to reattach a spirit to the body where it belongs, bringing the person back to life.  Normally I’d go into a lot more detail about Emma’s powers, but she has the strongest grasp on her own gift and its limitations out of just about anyone, and _Queen of Spades_ covers just about anything I’d want to add about her powers.  The one thing I will say is that I tried really hard to make her gift into something that wasn’t creepy or offensively morbid, despite the natural reaction that most people have to death and, uh, undeath.  I’ve always been interested in necromancy as a concept, especially since the knee-jerk reaction is to go NO BAD EVIL WRONG!  And just like anything else, necromancy isn’t an inherently evil concept.  The word literally means “to communicate with the dead,” with a peculiar twist that suggests it is used to view the future; that’s actually what gave me the idea to have Emma “ask” a person to come back rather than just forcing it on them.  In a sense, she communicates with the dead to see _their_ futures, namely whether or not they’ll come back to life.

McCANN: Projection empathy.  His gift is much weaker than Vasquez’s.  He can use it only to project outwards, and it’s vastly more limited in range and scope.  He uses it mainly to make his victims too afraid or too complacent to think or move; Faraday processes this as a wave of “cold” that keeps him in place.  It’s only useful on one or two people at a time.

DENALI: Water manipulation.  He can turn any part of himself or the things in close contact with him into water, while still maintaining his shape.  This makes it difficult to land physical attacks on him, though it also tends to make it hard for him to land physical attacks in turn while in that form.  He does have some minor control over water in his extreme immediate vicinity (as in, within a foot or so of his physical location), but not enough to weaponized it.  He could probably drown someone if they were close enough to him.  In our game of super-powered Rock-Paper-Scissors, Red Harvest’s lightning beats Denali’s water every time.

SHERIFF HARP: Camouflage.  Like a chameleon, the sheriff can blend into his surroundings.  He does not become invisible, though to anyone watching, this might seem to be the case.  His camouflage does not extend to his sound, scent, or mental output, so anyone with a gift like Chisolm’s or Vasquez’s could probably find him if they looked.  This is an actual physical property that changes (his appearance), rather than a mental trick like Halleck’s gift in _Trust Falls_.

EXTRAS / OCs:

Powder Dan: Pyrokinesis.  He can create and control fire with his mind.

Gavin: Communication with insects.  While he doesn’t actively control their actions, insects do not have strong minds or wills, so any suggestions or commands he makes are generally obeyed.

Josiah (schoolteacher): Pick-Up.  He learns any skill very quickly, taking no more than a month no matter how difficult the skill usually is.  This does not allow him to learn skills beyond the range of normal human ability.

Anthony (Josiah’s son): Plant manipulation.  He can speed up or slow down the life cycle of plants, and can manipulate fully grown plants.

Amy Packer: Teleportation.  She can move herself over extreme distances, or bring along other people or things at much shorter distances, so long as she has an idea of where she wants to go.  Places she has seen or been before are the best.  Pictures are good enough; verbal explanations are not.

Doc: Healing.  Doc’s gift works by skipping along the natural healing and repair process to a state where the injured person is healed (or more healed).  If a person is bleeding out, he can just jump ahead to a point when the wound has scabbed over and is no longer leaking blood.  This means he is limited by the human body’s own regenerative abilities.  He cannot, for example, reattach limbs or restart a stopped heart (with his gift, though obviously resuscitation is a thing that can be done manually).  However, he can force dead flesh to continue to “repair” itself even after the body is dead, which is why he works so well in conjunction with Emma.  Even when the patient is dead, he can fix them up enough for Emma to drag them back to life without worrying they’ll just kick the bucket all over again.  It’s super unpleasant for him, though, so he probably wouldn’t do it at all if he didn’t have a necromancer waiting in the wings to egg him on.

* * *

From _Queen of Spades_ :

MATTHEW CULLEN: Charmer.  His voice can create a sort of spell over any listener which convinces them to agree with him or to do as he says.  This is almost always unnoticeable in the moment, though people may realize later they were acting out of character and recognize they were being manipulated somehow.  Think of him as a very good conman—nobody feels as though they are being “forced,” though really they have no choice but to act as he wants them to act.  After some mishaps during his childhood, adult Matthew does not ever use his gift.

Extras / OCs:

Unnamed doctor: Herbalism.  His gift for healing works best through potions, though he can do some minor hands-on fixes.  Serious or widespread injuries, especially violent ones, are typically beyond him, because he works best over time.

* * *

From _Trust Falls:_

SCAR: Pain.  His gift tricks a person’s nerve endings into conveying pain despite the fact that no physical damage has been done.  He needs physical contact to make it work, but he can create a variety of different sensations to shape the type and the “tone” of the pain.  While he probably could use his power to create other feelings as well (namely, pleasurable ones), he has never used it in this way and no longer has the chance to learn otherwise.  Getting shot in the face tends to do that.

ABRAMS: Telekinesis.  He moves physical objects with the power of his mind.  Smaller objects are easier to move than larger ones; familiar objects are easier to move than unfamiliar ones.  His control is better over shorter distances and with fewer items to manipulate.  If he wants fine control over a large number of objects or over a few objects spread over a greater distance, it takes more time and more effort to establish control and he can’t do any fancy tricks with them.  He likes to make his mustache twitch because it unnerves people and they sometimes let things slip that they didn’t intend.  Unfortunately for him, Faraday is a weirdo who mostly just thinks it’s hilarious.

HALLECK: Perception manipulation.  He controls the way that people perceive people or objects within his range, making them “disappear” from people’s thoughts though not actually from sight.  While his gift is strongest used just on himself, he has developed the ability to spread his range out to a set of well-defined borders, such as the four walls of a room or a broken-down hut.  He must be conscious to keep his power active, and his power becomes less effective with people who know it exists; people who have been affected before and know about it are more likely to try to resist than those who are entirely unaware.

LEO: Mind manipulation / “Evil Eye.”  I don’t want to call this gift mind control and give people the wrong impression, because Leo Halleck does not control minds.  Think of him more like a snake charmer: if you look him in the eyes, he can sway in the wind and watch as you sway in turn.  With eye contact, he makes people more weak-willed and less likely to resist him.  He also has a bit of Faraday’s gift in reverse, where he can force a measure of “bad luck” on those who look him in the eyes.  This is very weak, especially in the long term, but it does mean that he tends to get his way more often than not.  Again, people who know about it can resist more easily, and people who have experienced it before are more likely to shake it off than people who haven’t.  His power is vaguely related to his father’s, which is more of a coincidence than anything else.  Gifts in this universe don’t necessarily follow any genetic line.

BRADY: Speed healing.  His gift forces an injury to move quickly toward its natural conclusion.  While typically this makes it seem like he is “healing” wounds, it does not actually do anything of the sort.  Fatal injuries are still fatal without treatment, and severe wounds can still become fatal if he doesn’t do anything beyond speeding them along.  In his case, the best method is to close up any new holes and then just speed things along; he skips the waiting period, but it isn’t necessarily better for a person to die in four hours rather than twenty-four, just because his gift doesn’t do any actual repairs on its own.

PIPER: His voice, like a siren’s, is enchanting.  He can force people into action, but strong-willed minds tend to fight; thus, the easiest way for him to use his gift is to use it on those who are injured, beaten-down, or sleeping, and then to give out very simple commands that most people wouldn’t have a problem following.  For example, convincing a sleeping person to keep sleeping, no matter what, wouldn’t seem very threatening, and so most people wouldn’t bother to fight.  Telling a man to follow him, when there are no visible signs of danger, would probably not seem worth a fight either.  Like any hypnotist will tell you, any attempts to get a person to do something they normally wouldn’t—well, those are going to cause a lot of problems.  For a creative person, there are ways of getting around this.  Telling someone to kill a person, or kill themselves, would probably set off all kinds of alarms if they have even the slightest hint of a moral code.  However, sticking a gun in their hands and then telling them to tighten their trigger finger might just slip past.  It’s an interesting conundrum.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all of you for reading, and for all the lovely comments and support! Note that this series is still not marked completed; there will be some short pieces that you all have requested popping up in the not-too-distant future. The main plot is still, generally speaking, finished, and there will be no new long fics added. Special thanks to Ad and Kat for being generally awesome and encouraging and just making me feel better about writing, for pushing me to finish, and for understanding when life got in the way of me actually finishing in a timely manner (whoops).
> 
> In case any of you are wondering, the next thing we'll see will be a couple prompts you guys have given me, plus a little randomness of my own. I've got a winter fic lined up next (hypothermia, not holidays), then a little alternate POV stuff (for which I have been offered actual, real-life cookies, so that's definitely happening), and we'll just see where it goes from there. I haven't even decided yet whether I'm stacking all this into one massive multi-chaptered disaster or taking it a fic at a time, but as always, I guarantee that whatever I start I will finish. Eventually. It'll take me a while sometimes, but I always get there in the end.


End file.
